Introduction
At Deep Dive #19, we introduced you to the Decentraland game that allows you to own virtual real estate with as high value as real life. This time we bring you a similar project, The Sandbox. The project has reached over 50 partnership agreements, including with Atari, Crypto Kitties, and Shaun, the Sheep, to build an innovative gaming platform, play to earn, create and own by the players themselves. Sandbox aims to bring blockchain into the gaming industry, attracting both crypto enthusiasts and gamers by offering advantages such as real ownership, rare digital assets, the creation of potential profits, and engagement.
Market Analysis
Play to earn is not a new form of gaming. It appeared a long time ago with the advent of games. But most of what players earn is limited by the game’s scope, not having much real-life value. Today, thanks to the development of NFT, technology has turned game items into valuable things. This has revolutionized the gaming market, making games more interesting, engaging, profitable, and meaningful for players.
Therefore the game sector is a very fast-growing market in the blockchain industry, especially with the increasing popularity of NFT. This market is expected to have great developments in the long term, not just instantaneously.
Product Highlight
AVATAR
An AVATAR is a representation of a player, which the owner may modify piece by piece. Specifically, this avatar will be modifiable piece by piece (helmet, arms, torso, legs, etc.) by equipping it with different compatible ASSET tokens. In other words, you can use SAND to make your Avatar look better and cooler.
The Sandbox ecosystem
The Sandbox is an ecosystem for Players and Creators, including a Voxel Editor (named “VoxEdit”), a Marketplace, and the game. Creators can make their own 3D voxel objects, animate, and publish/sell them in the worldwide marketplace.
(VoxEdit, source: Medium)
VoxEdit is a 3D tool that allows everyone to create or import their own voxel objects. People work on them and easily export them to the marketplace to turn them into limited ERC-1155 tokens called ASSETS, virtual tokens for digital scarcity, security, and authenticity.
The Marketplace is where players can be given away for free or sold ASSETS to others.
The Game is the game system where creators profit from their creations; players profit from collecting resources, rewards, and tokens.
LAND
LANDS are blockchain-backed virtual tokens (using the ERC-721 standard for NFTs) representing physical parcels of The Sandbox Metaverse, a virtual reality space in which users can interact with computer-generated environments and other users.
Each LAND comes with a set of pre-built terrains, but it can be formatted and modified by the players that own it (or other players they invite to work). In the future, players will be able to combine LANDs to form ESTATES, DISTRICT. In short, from a game perspective, ASSETS are items that players can create, and LAND is the land on which they live.
Paper: Papers are publicly available and transparent. Details can be found at The Sandbox Whitepaper.
Github: Public and regular posts. Details can be found at The Sandbox · GitHub .
The product status: Currently developing more functions. You can experience it at The Sandbox game.
Token Economy
Token Distribution
Token Name: SAND Token
Ticker: SAND
Blockchain: Ethereum
Contract: 0x3845badAde8e6dFF049820680d1F14bD3903a5d0
Token type: Utility
Token Standard: ERC-20
Total Supply: 3,000,000,000 SAND
Circulating Supply: 702,992,326.22 SAND
Token Utility
SAND is the primary utility and local currency in the game, which plays the main role in the functioning of the Sandbox. The Token usage will be as follows:
In-game currency: You spend SAND playing games, buy items, or customize your Avatar characters. The functions for each role include:
Creators spend SAND to acquire ASSETS, LANDS, and through Staking.
LAND Sales motivate demand of SAND to buy LANDS.
Artists use SAND to put ASSETS to the Marketplace and buy Gems for defining Rarity and Scarcity.
Governance: Holders can participate in Governance decisions of the platform through a DAO structure. You can vote rights on key elements, including Foundation grant attributions for contributors and feature prioritization on Roadmap.
Staking: You can stake your SAND to earn more passive revenue.
Fee Capture model: 5% of all transaction volume of Transaction Fees by SAND tokens can be allocated 50% to the Staking Pool as rewards for token holders that Stake SAND tokens and 50% to the ”Foundation.”
Foundation: Offering grants to incentivize high-quality products to support the ecosystem of The Sandbox. The Foundation has funded over 15 game projects and granted 100 artists to produce NFTs.
Network Valuation & Asset Pricing
SAND market cap is $464M with $305M volume in 24h. The top exchanges for trading in SAND are currently Binance, Tokocrypto, OKEx, CoinTiger, and Huobi Global.
Technical Analysis of SAND (Source: Cryptorphic, Tradingview)
It’s a mid-term hold signal and DYOR before investing. When the price breaks the $0.77 level and turns it into support. It’s highly likely SAND increase the 300%. But please note this is not investment advice; it is for informational purposes only.
DeFi Games trend that is booming during this time. As expected, this wave is not over yet and could increase even more, especially in the context of the bullish, BTC hit the $46,000 mark again. But be careful, no one knows when this trend will end, and the price of tokens related to games is seemingly overrating. Without a good entry, the consequences will be unpredictable.
Unique Selling Point (USP)
(Source: The Sandbox whitepaper)
The Sandbox platform architecture includes several components. There is a traditional backend running on the cloud (AWS) to support Sandbox’s web frontend in terms of blockchain integration. The project team uses An S3 bucket to store the asset of the artist before they mint.
The sandbox team plan to build a system to prevent everyone, even them, from peeking at the artist’s work pre-minting. Once a UGC asset is minted, the backend releases the ASSET on IPFS to become public.
They use smart contracts to record the hash of an ASSET so that the ASSET owner will always have the ability to prove ownership of the number recorded on the blockchain and the voxel model itself, and the various render.
Marketing
Telegram: Contact @sandboxgame – There are more than 23,914 active members.
Twitter: The Sandbox (@TheSandboxGame) – Has more than 153,400 followers.
Discord: The Sandbox – Has nearly 48,433 active members.
Medium: The Sandbox – Regularly post updates on the progress of the project and guide to play the game.
Backer
Investor
In the beginning, The Sandbox is a mobile game that was first released in May 2012 on iOS and Android platforms by gaming studio Pixowl and acquired for $4.875M by Animoca Brands, then incorporated a Voxel-style blockchain algorithm in the game. So far, The Sandbox has raised $4.51 million in funding for the blockchain-based version game. Their investors include square Enix, B Cryptos, True Global Ventures, Helix, Mind Fund, Blocore, ThunderCore, and Alexis Bonte from eRepublik.
(Source: Crunchbase)
Partners
Thanks to the support of Animoca Brands, The Sandbox has forged partnerships with a range of big names in both crypto and traditional. The most prominent is the partnership with the famous South China Morning Post (SCMP).
SCMP wants to create 3D voxel-based gaming and cultural experiences in The Sandbox and plans to launch a collection of exclusive NFTs inspired by its library of photography, visual illustrations, data visualizations, and infographics.
Team
Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano created Decentraland in 2015. The project began as a pixelated grid that allocated pixels to users through a proof-of-work algorithm. Decentraland later evolved into a 3D world, opened to the public in February 2020, and is overseen by the nonprofit Decentraland Foundation.
CEO and Director of The Sandbox
The Co-founder and CEO of Pixowl (acquired by Animoca Brands in 2018).
Board Member of Animoca Brands and a longtime social-gaming entrepreneur.
Sold two software companies, including Wixi Inc. and 1-Click Media
CTO of The Sandbox
The ex-CTO of Gameloft managed the studio and a team of 200 people.
Spend more than a decade leading mobile gaming studios
COO and Director of The Sandbox
The Co-founder and COO of Pixowl (acquired by Animoca Brands in 2018)
A speaker and evangelist on the opportunity Non-Fungible Tokens bring to gaming
President of the Blockchain Game Alliance in 2020
In addition, The Sandbox also has a strong board of advisors with highly influential individuals. With such a team, all challenges for The Sandbox will be somewhat mitigated.
(List of advisors, source: The Sandbox Whitepaper)
Conclusion
As the last episode, if you are a big fan of Minecraft, then The Sandbox is for you. The biggest difference compared to games in the same genre is the Play to earn mechanism, making playing games no longer just for entertainment but can earn high profits. However, with the current explosion of DeFi game trends, players should consider carefully before participating to avoid losing money. Wish you happy gaming!
This deep dive is for informational purposes, not investment advice. Readers will be responsible for all their actions.
Source : bscdaily
